The upcoming BrightOn Travel seminar, on Friday 25 September, will focus on different ways to drive cost effective traffic to travel websites and look at how the advent of mobile traffic may require a complete re-engineering of many booking paths.

I often use a supermarket analogy when looking at travel websites. In my opinion, too many companies focus their attention on re-arranging the shelves, putting up special offers and training check out staff, when their main focus should be on making sure people can find their supermarket, and park.

Google has long powered the main travel to our theoretical supermarket. Google is the motorway, and has well signposted SEO routes and increasingly expensive PPC ‘toll roads’. However, alternative roads are now being constructed, such as social media channels and mobile; to use our analogy, these act as satellite navigation tools which are changing the way we find and travel to the supermarket.

As PPC costs continue to escalate, travel companies are reverting to traditional marketing methods in order to develop brand identity. However, offline advertising on TV, radio and billboards still present challenges for the marketer.

An obvious one, is that companies seem to be re-allocating spend from highly measurable PPC budgets, to areas such as TV. Demonstrating the return on investment from offline advertising is much harder. Years ago one major price comparison site, described their TV advertising campaign as “Taking a big bucket of water, chucking it against a wall and then making sure you have an even bigger online bucket to catch it with”. The implication being that, ironically, PPC budgets need to increase when you do offline advertising and not decrease!

Historically, accountants within many organisations typically treat marketing expenditure as an overhead with fixed annual budgets. However, to accommodate the above quandary, many are now moving to defined metrics around Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and treating marketing spend as operating costs; as long as the increased spend is delivering a return, why restrict it?

How companies are rated by review sites such as Feefo, Trust Pilot and Review Centre, contributes to the size of the catchment bucket. A lack of star rating, or poorer star ratings than competitors, operates in reverse to offline advertising, driving higher CPA costs. Review metrics are bit like making sure you have sufficient parking at the Supermarket.

The second big topic of the BrightOn Travel seminar is trying to get companies to look beyond responsive design, as their main mobile first strategy. Marketing directors tend to lead mobile first strategies focused on allowing their existing sites to be used via mobile devices via responsive design, but few have the power to force other departments to review how they work in a mobile-first world.

The seminar will look at how companies like Teletext Holidays are trying to re-engineer their search and booking process. Teletext is reviewing ways to encourage mobile customers to call or web chat, with their call centre staff, using techniques such as mobile push recommendations. It is amazing how many different elements of the business are impacted by what looks like a simple change in process.

I personally think many travel companies are failing to engage in the process of understanding how customers’ interactions with them will be impacted by device size, and the environment in which people are searching. Here are a few examples:

•         Environment: Customers on a train surfing via their mobile, are unlikely to want to phone to book, so providing online chat is important.
•         Recommendations: The combination of slower connectivity via mobile devices and smaller screen sizes, make it harder for customers to review results, giving a preference for more recommendations.
•         Facebook. The Facebook app on people’s phones dominates internet usage, so how does your Facebook advertising reflect this.

BrightOn Travel intends to create discussion around these topics, with speakers from leading travel brands sharing their experiences and flagging key areas for review. We will have a lively daytime event and an even more dynamic discussion afterwards in the sponsored bar at the boutique MyHotel.

Ensure your place at the event via the Eventbrite page.